Food rationing coming soon: it will be called “choice-editing”.

Has nobody among these GramscoFabiaNazi “researchers” considered that children need to be fat in places like Stockton-on-Tees, because it’s effing cold a lot of the time? (So your children can, indeed must, be fat, or they will be uncomfortable.)

And that in wealthy, hot Sussex, way-down south of here, it’s just, well, hot? (So your children can, indeed must, be thin, or they will be uncomfortable.) They have successful vineyards, for f***’s sake.

Anyway, those effete southerners are too close to all those “Haute Couture” designers in strange places like London and Paris who seem to think all humans ought to be 3-meter-high-skeletal boys with a scowl, so they probably get to like thin children…

And of course, picking and treading the Sussex grapes, for the Political-Enemy-Superclass to crow about in venezuela and Cuba, in the traditional pre-capitalist-barbarian grape-treading-manner, gets you fit and thin.

23 responses to “Food rationing coming soon: it will be called “choice-editing”.”

Note also the sly little reference to one of the Nutter Class’s other little obsessions- breast feeding. Bottle feeding makes you fat. This one derives from their romanticist idealisation of “natural things” (like breast feeding, the rural scene, smallpox, famine and rickets) and hatred of “unnatural” things (like television, industry, antibiotics and abundant food). Bottle feeding is unnatural, so must be proven to be evil. The War On Baby Milk is one of their longest running slow-burn campaigns.

I remember having to teach about how awful dried baby-milk was, to biology students in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Actually, it wasn’t biology, it was geography! I remember now. We were to learn how to get at the MEDCs, for using TNCs as RAOC, in order to destroy the lifestyles and NICs of the NPs who lived in LEDCs.

Ian B, the real problem is that lots of these credentialled Public Liberal females are so saturated with anti-depressants and other conspiracy drugs, to try to cope with their trying to live on urban levels of abstraction at a third and seventh remove from reality, that a single feeding of /their/ breast milk would induce cot death in a hecatomb of babies. It is a plain matter of projection….

…nowish, the Canucks have made it clear, fat is GOOD. I would just add, ONLY as long as it is dairy, animal and STRAIGHT from nuts and fish.

As a sometime farmer of soybeans, I can tell you the objective truth, only the Japs know how to make soy fit for human consumption in small doses, through tofu and the natural fermentation of “Chinese blood,” or soy sauce.

Hydrogenated oil however is POISON, corn oil and high-fuckedUS corn syrup IS murder, and THIS is the LAST word on that….

I can remember food rationing very well although I was only ten when it was abolished. Our family business was in the animal feed trade and my father told me a great deal more about his wartime and austerity experiences.

It’s odd: three people have recently come to me with scare stories that the authorities are getting ready to impose rationing and that it’s somehow tied up with securing a captive market for the big agro-chemical companies.

Firstly – It is quite a normal function of government to plan for emergencies – or it should be. I was told “ration books are being printed” but they would be quite unusable in the modern retail environment and would have to be elcctronic. I still have some family ration books and they relied on the shop assistant using a pair of scissors to cut out the “points” for different classes of food on each purchase.

Actually the wartime system worked remarkably well. Nobody in Britain starved and people became a great deal healthier – not that I’m advocating it now! My mother and father went to Dublin in 1946/47 where there was no rationing and my mother was quite ill. The doctor said she had “English tummy” from the unaccustomed rich food – a milder form of the nutritional shock which killed some concentration camp victims introduced too suddenly to a rich diet.

I think the story going the rounds has something in common with one which originated in Labour circles in Scotland during the Falklands war. It was said that the government was refusing passports to young men of military age because they were going to introduce conscription. Quite sensible people like my sister (a social worker) were convinced of this by people of some standing and urged others to contact MPs etc. It was total hooey. As a former trained territorial, I was certain that they would come for people like me first, as untrained recruits need training. But it was a very widely believed and clever piece of political scaremongering – as, I think, is the ration book story.

Actually David, I think you are a bit off the mark there. I haven’t looked at them recently bu the statistics about heart disease etc were pretty clear.
I also had an aunt, a senior nutritionist and later
principal of a Domestic Science College who was responsible for things like setting up kitchens in village schools and factories. She was of the opinion that people were healthier – and she was an independent, conservatively minded woman.
But the clincher was my mother’s comment that “the babies all looked so much healthier in the wartime”. Those of poorer families were getting a properly blanced, vitamin-supplemented diet for the first time.

I think you are falling into “Four legs goo, two legs bad” over-simplification

Thank God things have improved since then and I am not suggesting for a minute that we should return to them. Rations were tight – even tighter after the war than during it, as Britain transferred supplies to avert starvation in Germany. Even bread was rationed which had not been rationed before.

Housing for many people was pretty grim anyway and the wartime destruction of housing stock ensured that every corner was used. I can remember squatters in a former army camp near us.

But that was the result of total war. The miracle of Lord Woolton and others (like Marguerite Patten who is still with us and my late aunt who is not and the WarAg committees in each county) was to ensure that nobody starved. There is a recently produced book of wartime recipes from government leaflets called “Eating for Victory” and some of the recipes are really quite nice but the size of the portions makes you realise how very meagre things were – no problems with obesity/bulaemia etc in total war. Those are the effects of prosperity. Long may we prosper!

Whenever looking at health statistics, one must remember the number of ailments, especially infectious disease, which once picked many people off long before they had a chance to get heart disease, cancer etc. If there are a thousand things to die from, and 500 are eradicated, the incidence of the other 500 will increase to make up the numbers. Diseases of old age in particular will rise.

Also, there is greater and more precise diagnosis, and a vested interest by many groups in raising the statistics.

The rationing diet may well have improved nutrition for those who had previously been suffering inadequate diets lacking in vital nutrients such as vitamins. The obession however now is with supposed diseases of plenty. Babies may have looked healthier in the war (or maybe just compared to everyone else looking iller and thinner on limited rations) compared to the 1920s and 30s. I am deeply sceptical that they looked healthier than modern babies. Maybe they just looked healthy compared to the drab 1940s austere surroundings, or maybe psychologically the arrival of a baby was a cause for joy amid all the misery of war, leading to an over-appraisal of their physical glow.

The idea that people are suffering currently from food is- hell I am sick of trying to be moderate- complete fucking bullshit of the most repulsive order. If neurotic loons want to believe their food is poisoned by whatever the latest hate fad is- corn oil or hydrogenated oil or monosodium glutamate or whatever- let them. But it’s bilge. Nobody beyond a few self-starvers in the modern west (you can spot the starvers, those sickly waifs mithering about macrobiotic this and their “allergy” to that) suffers from malnutrition, and it is perverse to have the food neurotics, medical profession and their fanboys trying to claim otherwise.

Each generation has turned out to be taller and longer lived than the last so, of course, things have got better, largely due to nutrition and improved housing.

I detest the food fascists as much as I detest the tobacco fascists but what was achieved in the war and austerity was remarkable and ensured survival.
HOWEVER, an older business colleague was in the army and married a Dutch girl soon after the war. When he first went to Holland after the war, the country was picked clean – anything was welcome – a scrap of leather, a bit of cloth, a few pins and needles or food of any sort.

Yet within two years, the exchange was the other way round. The Dutch scrapped controls like the Germans in 1948 . The black market disappeared overnight because there was only one market. Labour was so fixated with “fair shares” and “priorities” (nothing changes there!) that rationing continued until 1953. The Conservatives dismantled it in stages from 1951. So something which had been a vital war-winning system for survival became a drag on the economy.

DavidNcl, actually I’m not much for “conspiracy,” just The Usual Stupid Clever Plotting That Goes On…And On. The Sufis say that if you know about your own greed for money, power & easy access to pussy, well, then you pretty much know what is going on, at least on the first nine or dozen levels of “hidden” motivation, or so.

As an example, then, the main /result/ of conventional medicine structurally is to make the statistically normal patient into a cash cow for the pharmaceutical houses. This is done by training doctors to issue Rx that is dependency-forming and perhaps even lethal to quit, such as the statin-class of cardio meds. In just the same way, it’s after-market sales that make the World go round, or TBA as we say here, “tyres, er, tires, batteries, accessories.”

Now beyond this, some cynical members of the Obvious Elite may well think of this as being the population-reduction “goal” “hidden” in conventional medicine, but since they also “think” that they are “in charge” their notions of personal power are basically as crass as mine, and this objectively is not a serious problem. People like that are always stepping on their own dicks and getting into the papers, like Cheney, Madoff, the Obvious Pedo (Karl Rove.) They of course have quondam managers who are pursuing purposes on the whole no more congruent, but maybe just a little more sneaky — but, layer by layer like onions, not much more. If a person indeed wants to get farther into this it is a matter then of developing some skill in solitude at so-called active imagination, and there are books available about this. Meanwhile, if you would just wish for once to get a little bit beyond the conventional prostatic ranting of us ageing demi-caucasian old males, well, Half-Past Human is sort of a cool website….

Edward, thank you for the reference, all I’ve read about it is Calder’s 1969 /The People’s War/ and that’s been awhile. It was there that I first read that the powers that be at the time feared the WW II Tommy wasn’t up to his dad’s mark in the 1914-18 trenches.

For the seamier side of wartime rationing/austerity – the black market and spivs, deserters etc,
see “AN UNDERWORLD AT WAR”
by Donald Thomas , Publisher John Murray 2003.
It doesn’t do to get to starry eyed but the achievement of feeding and clothing everybody was essential to winning the war and a great achievement nonetheless.

I knew a farmer who made a great deal of money from market gardening (vegetables were not rationed) . He didn’t like paying the very high rate of wartime income tax on everything. So he would carry some of his takings to the dog track.
At the end of the races, he would see the clerk of the course and say he had won heavily and was frightened to take the cash home in the black-out. The clerk would give him a cheque for the money and hey-presto! It was untaxable gambling winnings. I should say that he was a gambling man with a good memory and could have given the Revenue a convincing account of the dogs who brought him such good fortune so often!

My ninety-one-years’ old farm neighbour, Mr Judson Andersen, who was in the Army in WW II, is scathing about “homefront heroes,” bogus “4-Fs” and “ALL the lying sonsofbitches and tailchasers who cashed in selling each other stolen tires and gas stickers!” He says “if the dumb bastards’d really known they were being asked to get killed for THESE pricks they’d have taken the joint apart!” On the other hand, Jud is no slouch and as he is a skilled welder didn’t have to go abroad. Indeed, he was working as a civilian contractor in the Navy yard at Pearl at the Jap raid, and when called up he welded add-ons to tanks and tracked vehicles in Oklahoma and Ft Lewis, Washington. He hates my romance with steam locomotives as he “got dragged all over Hell on the God-damn things by the assholes during the God-damn war.” Also, “if the sonsofbitches could stop in a God-damn tunnel and gas your ass they God-damn it WOULD!” At the end, in the prolonged process of getting out of the Army, Mr Andersen DID “go all over Hell,” from Ft Lewis to southern California and then Tennessee and back to Ft Sill, Oklahoma, before being (finally!) de-mobbed at Ft Leonard Wood, Missouri. “I lugged my dufflebags all over the God-damn country, I had a bunch of these Army coveralls tucked away in there, damn good duds for work, the only thing the dirty bastards had that was worth a shit except for the atom bomb, and you bet I kept a real close eye on ‘em…so then, sure as Hell, they marched us all into this God-damn warehouse and said ‘alright, you dumb bastards, now these Jap swords and flags and German pistols and shrunken heads, you were dumb enough to play along with the BS, you get to keep all that bullshit, nobody gives a hooper’s good God-damn about THAT. But ANYTHING of Uncle Sammy’s stays right here — so dump ‘em out, you yardbird brain GI assholes!’ Jesus Christ almighty, Jew and liberal, I was madder than a complete sonofabitch, but anyway, to Hell with ‘em, I had the last laugh! In ’47 in Mankato the Yid Ohsman had a whole shitaree of the damn boilersuits, war-surplus, two bits each. I made out like a God-damn thief AND a Democrat THAT day! God DAMN ‘em to Hell anyway…!”

Indeed, the first time Mr Andersen told me this, in 1968, he was attired in one of the coveralls, much patched by his mother then yet living, and he still wears an old pair often in the Winter, although now he has to roll and pin up the much-frayed cuffs. Mr Andersen, never tall, by his own account has “kind of fallen in on myself…kind of like that asshole Bush sonofabitch!”

Sounds quite a character.
This is a bit off-topic
but I have a friend of 95, Harry Beckhough. He
studied German before the war, was in Germany as a student when Hitler took over. He became a wartime colonel in the Intelligence Corps and was appointed (1946-52) to get the German Rhineland Universities denazified and up and running. He had a successful business career, founded a private school which is still flourishing
and now runs an anti-EU group. Two years ago he published his autobiography “Thinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy” (His business was in clothing). He is as spry and trim as many a 60 year old and runs a Summer school on cryptology at Marlborough College where he is billed as the country’s oldest lecturer. That generation were tough.

It is these excursions into remembrance that make the whole thing worthwhile for me, Edward. There’s a whole archive, ‘Mankato History This Month’ (or was anyway, I’ve not looked for awhile), on-line at kmsu.org, with my volunteer interviews in 2003-8 about our local history here in south-central Minnesota….